As everyone is in Campfire is makes lots of sense for us to do this. We don’t waste time having to ask people in the team what they are doing since it is all there.

How are our apps doing?

We have recently created a couple of web applications in Tricklr and Vistazo. Every now and again people ask ‘How many users do we have?’ or 'How many projects are there’. Typically questions like this result in

SSHing into the server

Logging into PostgreSQL

Running some queries

Pasting the results into Campfire

About the fourth time of doing this it became obvious this is a job for automation!

First pass

A first pass at this resulted in a quick rake task after about 20 minutes from start to deploy. The rake task uses tinder a neat little gem for interacting with Campfire from Ruby.

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About the author

George Ornbo is a hacker, futurist, blogger and Dad based in Buckinghamshire, England.